It’s that time of year again. I can feel it in the air. Time for hot chocolate, lit fireplaces, sleigh rides, Santa wish lists, wreaths on windows, tacky sweater parties, Nativity scenes, stockings, gift searching, Christmas lights, eggnog and caroling.
Except— wait a second— it’s not even Thanksgiving.
I thought that we had some hope here in [...]

I have only one important memory from preschool: I’m sitting on the toilet in the bathroom that’s in the back of the classroom, and the door swings open. I probably didn’t close it all the way because it took me a long time to figure that out. I’m not finished yet and thus cannot get [...]

Welcome, everyone, to the wonderful month of Novembeard. Also known (perhaps more popularly so) as No-Shave November, these thirty days are being celebrated by thousands of men across the country who, in order to raise awareness of their ability to cover their faces in keratinized dead cells, are shunning razors and scissors alike with energy [...]

According to an earth-shaking study recently conducted by the Tell Us What We Want To Hear Foundation, smoking cigarettes creates more time in a person’s life. Led by the organization’s core research team of idealists, the hope-based study asserts that for every cigarette a person smokes, 17.3 minutes can be added to his or her [...]

This past weekend, I decided it was time for me to get high.
I had gotten close to it before, gotten to the brink of experiencing that focused, crazy and creative energy that some of my friends had told me about, but I had never let the substance fuse into my blood and direct my mind [...]

In the first week of my poetry class, we were told that all astonishing poems have one common element: an awareness of our human mortality, of our inescapable deaths. Dickinson, Poe and Whitman understood this; Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg understood it, too. To them, ignoring death as a theme in their works would have been like standing in a hurricane and insisting that it was a good day to catch a tan.

To avoid it, in other words, would have made their poems the same as 99.9 percent of the poems ever written: forgotten.

If our lives are like poems — and I think they are, with their melodic bursts of beauty and poignancy, sadness and truth — then Farhat Hamidullah was one of the greatest poets I’ll ever know.

In an effort to add to my increasingly embarrassing pile of “things to read soon” and to support my fellow liberal arts folks in Cherry Hall, I bought something from the English club book sale Wednesday.
A week ago, I wouldn’t have given the book I ended up buying a second look.
But a week ago, I [...]

I have a confession to make.

I shop at Wal-Mart.

Whoop-dee-doo, you’re saying. Who doesn’t?

People occasionally ask me how I come up with topics for this column. I usually reply with something vague like, “I don’t know” (because I don’t) or, “Sometimes things just hit me” (because they do).

This week, though, it honked. Before, it had also yelled at me, thrown a half-full beer can at me and even pushed me off the road.

I went to a circus last weekend.
In the loud center of the ring, dozens of gaping, drunk lions prowled hungrily around dozens of clustered, laughing and seemingly unaware gazelles. People watched from the fringe of the scene and sipped on their beers.
The circus band yelled, “Y’all having a good time tonight?”
To which the lions and [...]